Well, this is awkward. Katie Holmes’ grand return to the stage with Broadway’s Dead Accounts has been cut short after a mere month and nearly two months before the play was scheduled to end. The reason? Extremely poor ticket sales. These photos were taken last Thursday before the announcement was made, and now Page Six is reporting that Katie also had the misfortune of encountering a drunk Bethenny Frankel at a pre-Chrismas party, and Bethenny was slurring all over the place and ran up to Katie to demand the name of her divorce lawyer. Poor Katie. She doesn’t need that crap.

Now back to the business at hand. Even though it pains me to do so, I guess since I freely handed the blame for the bombing of Rock of Ages to Tom Cruise, it’s only fair to ask whether Katie should bear the brunt of the blame for her play’s (very) early closing. Obviously, Katie was intended as the star power of the production while two-time Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz was widely recognized as the true talent of the show. Nobody has ever accused Katie of being a great actress, but they did expect her to put asses in seats for this play. Sadly, that didn’t happen, but I don’t think the play’s title or its subject matter (corruption of Wall street, city vs. country living) was a good match for a holiday run either. Further, the reviews for the play itself have only been lukewarm, and Broadway tickets are so expensive that people aren’t really willing to spend a few hundred dollars (or more) on a play that is just okay.

By the way, Tom Cruise is probably chuckling over this new wrinkle in Katie’s professional life, but his Jack Reacher isn’t doing so hot at the box office either. After two weeks, Tom’s lift-wearing brick sh-thouse has only grossed $44.5 million, which isn’t exactly the action-hero success that Mission: Impossible 4 suggested was entirely possible on a repeated basis. Is the failure of Reacher Tom’s fault? Absolutely. This is what happens when Tom Cruise purchases the rights to very beloved source materialand then crapsall over it. Don’t even try to tell me that the Sandy Hook tragedy turned people off to gunplay in movies because the hyper-violent Django Unchained (which has already grossed $64 million in less than a week) is on track to be Quentin Tarantino’s biggest box-office hit thus far. As for Katie’s Dead Accounts? Here are the details:

Katie Holmes Broadway play Dead Accounts is dead in the water.

The show — by “Smash” creator Theresa Rebeck — opened last month and will shut Jan. 6, after just 44 regular performances. Reports said the show’s bringing down the final curtain a full seven weeks ahead of schedule.

“I am extremely proud of this production and the cast… we are all sad to see Dead Accounts end on Broadway,” producer Jeffrey Finn told theater Web site Broadwayworld. “I look forward to working with this remarkably talented cast and creative team again very soon.”

Co-starring Norbert Leo Butz, the play opened Nov. 29 to mixed reviews, and reports say the show’s closure is due to poor ticket sales.

The Post’s theater critic Elisabeth Vincentelli said of Holmes’ performance: “She’s got one note – shrill, impatient – and yells it at top volume, making a vein bulge on her slender neck,” and, “with its cardboard characters and implausible developments, Dead Accounts feels like a rough first draft.”

The show was touted as a comeback for Holmes after her high-profile, bombshell divorce from Tom Cruise earlier in the year. But, it seems, her star power wasn’t enough to overcome critics’ disdain and keep ticket sales at the Music Box Theatre going.

So is the early closure of Dead Accounts on Broadway really Katie’s fault? I don’t know. The public overwhelmingly supports Katie for the righteous way she dumped the spawn of Xenu, but that doesn’t mean automatic ticket sales. Another complicating factor is that there’s so much more being offered right now on Broadway in terms of Hollywood star power that really does put asses in seats. So far, Scarlett Johansson’s turn as Maggie the Cat in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has resulted in $843,215 for its first seven preview performances. Al Pacino is also killing it on Broadway with a Glengarry Glen Ross revival that brings in $1.2 million in weekly ticket sales. Honestly, I know that Katie has spoken before of her love of being onstage, but I don’t think Broadway is the place for her. You know what she really needs to do instead? Go back to television. The small screen loves Katie Holmes.

And YES, Tiny Tom is the reason Reacher isn’t doing well (BWAHAHAHAHA) and I’m one of the people who refuses to go and see him crap on Jack Reacher. I am a great fan of the books–I have every single one of them and I love them all–but the GMD is NOT Jack Reacher and never will be. It’s ludicrous that he tried to play him, and I sincerely hope it’s a huge nail in the coffin of his career. I also hope Belgium will end up being a huge nail in the coffin of $cientology. A 2013 double-slam!!! *crosses fingers*

Why don’t these famewhores get it. Being papped every other day for over 6 months does not make you more popular, but actually the reverse. I always thought TC was crazy but KH is calculating her PR campaign in a very off-putting way. Her smirk was always annoying but now it is insufferable.

^ This x infinity. Any small amount of sympathy I might have had for Katie Holmes evaporated the minute she moved her daughter to New York and began parading her up and down the streets on a daily basis. She seems impossibly smug for a woman with little talent and no career to speak of.

She already lived in NY she just lived in a different apartment. So she should just lock herself and Suri in her house and never leave, is that what your saying? She’s just like any of the other hundred actors living in New York who walk around and live their lives. Except she was part of the biggest Hollywood story of the year so of course paps are going to follow her 24/7. Not exactly her fault.

When you get involved with TC you are either terribly dumb, crazy yourself or a calculating famewhore. In KH it is definitely the latter. She is calling the paps to take pictures of her and her kid. She is even worse because she is using her own child to get publicity she does not get from her talent. I find her disgusting!

Well, the play got a poor review in the NY Times, and that’s generally the end of it. That’s how it works in the Broadway universe. Not her fault, and the review didn’t seem to be blaming it fully on her. Broadway is a medium very much under the control of reviewers. No single actor is going to turn that around. The producers of this play knew ten minutes after that review hit the stands that they were done.

People tend to see Katie as a victim in this whole Cruise thing, but let’s face it, without him she’d long ago have been forgotten. She’s an average TV actress at best, and simply does not have either the talent or the presence to succeed on stage or screen.

Whether or not she’s victim of a lift wearing megalomaniac and his alien cult doesn’t really have anything to do with the level her career was at, but I would argue that Cruise actually stunted her career. She was supposed to be in the second Nolan batman movie instead of that idiotic mad money, and she had been developing a reputation for her indie sexier indie work. TC tried to remake her in his image and ruined everything she had already built. People forget that she was actually quite well received by the industry at the time. It’s one of the reasons TC wanted her.

a broadway friend took me to the play the second night it opened. It was pretty bad. She wasn’t great but she wasn’t terrible. the problem was that it was badly written. It was like a sitcom episode that dealt with “big” issues.

I’m a NY-er and inveterate theatre goer, and I wanted to see Katie Holmes, but I couldn’t bring myself to see another Theresa Rebeck play. My bf and I saw her other BW play, “Seminar”, which was so poorly written even Alan Rickman couldn’t save it (and you know that has to be bad!). Good acting is not enough to save a bad play. I was actually jealous of my bf for sleeping through the last half. And in fact the reviews generally did blame the play, not the actors. I don’t understand how Rebeck continues to get her plays produced on BW.

I went to see Jack Reacher and the film was not bad. I walked away enjoying it. There was the scene where all the ladies were turning their head when he walks into the bar. I was like, ‘Come On’. Also the shooting did not help because I am sure that would have been a big promotional push. This film will not bomb, it will make back its budget and then some. Tom Cruise is still a international BO draw.

What a bummer. Don’t really think that the blame should be on Katie. The subject matter is a freakin bummer and who wants to see something sad like that around Christmas? People still have enough financial problems without paying tons of money to have it pointed out to them. That being said its very hard to get a play off the ground(especially now) and many often close early.

I think we were all routing for her to get out of that horrible marriage and create a sane life for her daughter, and we were thrilled when she did. Was anyone routing for her to have a successful acting career?

Her kid’s life might be somewhat better, but it seems far from sane. Sorry, but I don’t see any parenting skills by that woman. She pimps her out despite the fact that the kid always seems so miserable, and it’s a nonstop parade of crappy food. And lest we forget the baby bottle until she was 5?? Given how often Tom was around, I don’t think you can blame that foolishness on him.

Her daughter has a stable home now instead of constantly being dragged around the world. She’s getting a proper education now. I’ve seen plenty of photos of Suri having playdates with other kids and yes, eating healthy foods like apples. Seems like she’s doing pretty well to me. People will always find something to criticize.